Immigration Defeat Repeats Health Mistake

By Bill Cahir Newhouse News ServiceWASHINGTON -- The process that killed a Senate immigration overhaul echoed a similar defeat that Democrats suffered more than a decade ago with the fight over health care reform.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in September 1993 released a White House health insurance plan that was supposed to represent an authoritative step forward in the debate on coverage for the uninsured.

Instead, the Clinton task force turned out to be a huge mistake for Democrats.

The First Lady's task force cloaked health policy issues from voters and prevented lawmakers from playing a role in drafting a bill. The closed-door process produced a legislative proposal that was difficult to summarize, much less understand in full.

Republicans in 1994 had little trouble demonizing the Clinton health care bill as a proposal that would wreck not just the medical system in the United States but also the economy as a whole.

Senate lawmakers who favor a change to domestic immigration laws made a similar if not identical mistake this year.

Proponents of "reform" avoided amendment fights in the Senate Judiciary Committee by drafting their immigration bill in private. They presented the finished package as a done deal. They fanned the flames of hostility outside the Congress and within the Senate by claiming that any substantive change amounted to a killer amendment. They presented the need for change as a wholesale justification for a bill that many reasonable people regarded as unworkable."If we cannot control our borders now, then how can we reasonably expect to manage future immigration programs that will inevitably increase the numbers of individuals seeking to enter this country illegally?" U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Lehigh Valley, said in a statement on Thursday.

Perhaps the advocates of the Senate immigration proposal underestimated the most powerful force in American politics: not money, incumbency, venality, opportunism, or alcoholism, but inertia.

The Senate on Thursday failed to limit debate, 46-53, on the immigration bill that had been drafted by two Bush administration officials and a few elite senators from both parties.

U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, one of the GOP lawmakers who took part in the bill-drafting process, on Thursday claimed that the private talks on immigration policy had been open to all comers.

"There were senators who came in, made suggestions, and had their ideas carried out," said Specter, R-Pa. "Senator Menendez, illustratively ... It was an open house all the way along. We did our utmost to be good with everybody, and I think we were fair."

But U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was never too crazy about the immigration deal; he criticized as too harsh on divided immigrant families.

The demise of the Senate immigration bill raised a fundamental question about the "reform" process: Even if a Senate Judiciary Committee debate had taken weeks, prompted a slew of amendments and produced an imperfect bill, would that process have been more open to the public and promoted voter confidence in the final product?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Thursday's Senate action "proves that the American people, who are tired of weak immigration proposals, have been heard," U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Warren, claimed in a statement Thursday.

It was Specter in his rueful floor remarks who noted that no one member of Congress could claim to speak for all of the American people. But Specter shared the pessimism about future action on immigration policy. Specter after his news conference Thursday was asked if the immigration bill would be revived before the 2008 elections. "I doubt it," he replied. And that follows the health care script to the letter.